


until there is nothing left

by zagspect



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: (munches popcorn) the fighters are fightinggggg, Gen, demeter aspect malphon, post-credits but vague about it, veeeeeery brief mentions of hades and skelly and meg and than, zag and malphon are the souls of the innocent A BAGEL vine, zagreus' love of lecturing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:06:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28552827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zagspect/pseuds/zagspect
Summary: look, it's very simple. you just kill worse than death. total obliteration. it's really unthinkable that you wouldn't take the opportunity in front of you.demeter would have.
Relationships: Zagreus & Malphon (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 36





	until there is nothing left

**Author's Note:**

> why gloves on the my hands do a destruction? no violent intrusive thoughts. soft voice, soft baby bird.

Hades is dying. Again. If Zagreus looks really close he can see where his father is falling apart as the river takes him. Zagreus doesn't want to see that part, because if he does, he'll start thinking about this time as a window of opportunity, a few seconds where he can run in and- he can't look. He sees his father, dying. It is someone else who would look at this and see anything other than that.

He falls backwards, into the snow- won by the skin of his teeth, this time, so he'll be dead any minute- and puts his hands up so that Demeter's gloves cover his face. It is a good practice, when you are angry with someone, to take a moment and see things from their point of view. They close his eyelids, like on a corpse, and they make him want to laugh for thinking of that. As if they'd ever let a corpse be so full and whole on their watch.

From their point of view, he can barely make out the trees over him, but boy oh boy oh boy can he see every twitch and breath of every creature breathing and moving within them. If there is one thing Demeter wanted in her time together with Malphon, one urge she nourished, it was that everything living and moving needs to be dead right this second. She watered this urge and nourished it and Zag can't help but twitch his glassy borrowed eyes at every sound and know exactly how to make them all stop.

He hates his father so much.

"I'm not doing it", Zag says out loud. He can't keep the frustration out of his voice. "Really, I'm not."

Hades has been nothing but cruel. He can imagine it now, jumping in while the Styx claims his father and tearing over and over until there's nothing left for it to wash away. He would never re-form again, never walk out of the pool at the front of the house. He would be scattered dust and thick globs of blood. Malphon has destroyed this completely before, so they know it can be done- this is the form they did it in, even, so the opportunity feels real and living. Any other time, even they would think it's impossible. But now... 

Demeter-Malphon feels the flutter of eyelashes on their palms- Zagreus is squeezing his eyes shut and opening them as if one or the other will make thought go away- and then Zag takes a deep breath in and, unthinkably, takes them off.

It's about time. Everyone has warned Zagreus about these gloves from day one and they suppose he finally has the sense to-

"No," he sighs. He gathers them up out of Demeter's eternal snow and holds them close against him. He still does not put them on. "Listen. You know exactly how I feel about my father." They do. They often think he is too soft on Hades, particularly when they are seeing the world the way Demeter would want them to. Zagreus sometimes thinks he is too hard on his father. Everyone agrees on being stubborn.

"All of that aside, at the very least, if he were gone permanently, I would have to do his job. You may not have noticed it, staying low-key when we're in the House and all, but my father has a desk job, so I would have to attend to all of his parchmentwork, and then _all_ you arms would sit and get dusty until the next round of fighters came along."

Zag vaguely remembers using this same sort of threat against Skelly. Don't play with my emotions, or you don't get any more violence. He should thank Meg, he thinks, next time he sees her. It's a good trick. It works on him, too.

"Are we clear?"

Clear as mud. If their focus was towards Zagreus, they would understand him, but he had asked them about their time with Demeter before setting off on that run, and so he only has himself to blame for this disagreement. 

"I don't regret it, you know," he says. His voice is growing weaker, and his hands on them shake as he tries to hold on. The river is creeping underneath. "We aren't going to follow through on your idea, but I don't regret asking you along. I have a lot of ideas others don't think are all that gre-" he coughs, and finally feels the warm water at his back. He can save his lecture for when they are in any mood to understand him. 

"-That great," he finishes. He is determined, it seems, to get the last word in. "You know I asked Thanatos if he wanted to sit in the sun with me, once? Really wasn't thinking, that time."

That comes out in a wheeze. He is about to die.

"And they all still care about me anyway."

_And what, exactly_ , Malphon thinks as Zagreus is pulled down into the Underworld again, _am I supposed to know about care_. They think this as Zagreus' body pulls itself together in the pool, curled around them. Whatever he knows that they don't, they will think about it later, with a different mind. Maybe he will ignore this aspect from now on, maybe he will continue to feed it, and listen to them without _listening_ to them. He's stupid like that.

They will look back and see a more favorable trait, at a later time. Even from this perspective.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!!!


End file.
